43: SOUL-L (Part 2: Occult)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Episode 43. We are continuing to unpack the five main areas the devil claims a right to be in our lives. Today we’re looking specifically at the occult.

Hello, Father.

[00:33] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. We have a dark topic today, don’t we?

[00:37] Stephanie: We do. But I’m happy to be with you in it. Why don’t we start with an icebreaker?

[00:44] Marcus: Let’s do that before we dive into the deep end.

[00:47] Stephanie: I’m curious. What is your favorite month of the year?

[00:51] Marcus: My favorite month? Well, that is a very good question. I think the one I look forward to the most on a regular basis is probably the… that’s a really good question. I don’t know that I have one. You know, it’s like my eight year old self would have said July.

[01:11] Stephanie: I was thinking about that too, that my young self would have said May. It’s my birthday month, but also I loved spring and it was breaking into the summer and stuff. But now my adult self says November, so, I get it.

[01:26] Marcus: I know. I tended to lean towards December too, just because growing up, my dad’s birthday was that month, my birthday was that month, my sister’s birthday was that month. Plus Christmas and coming right off of Thanksgiving.

[01:39] Stephanie: Yes, it’s a happy month.

[01:41] Marcus: It was a happy month. Plus I played a lot of basketball and December was really peak basketball season. So it all worked.

[01:49] Stephanie: It does. Oh, that’s fun. Well, now that we’ve built a little bit of joy, in case someone missed the last episode, will you give us a quick overview of the acrostic SOUL-L?

[02:04] Marcus: SOUL-L represents five common ways we open doors to the devil to give him permission to a place in our lives. So it’s Sin, Occult, Unforgiveness, Lies we believe, and Lineage. That’s what SOUL-L stands for.

[02:22] Stephanie: So we’re walking through it, and today we are on the occult. You often say if sin opens the front door to the devil, the occult is like throwing open the garage door. As we are starting, can you give us a definition for the word “occult”?

[02:41] Marcus: Yes, it has to do with the idea of hidden. It comes from a Latin word that has the idea of hiddenness or secrecy connected to it. And so through the years, the word occult has been used of people who seem to know the secrets of magic. That is, how to get magical information, how to get magical powers, what are the secrets of those arts?

Going into that has been developing a craft, like witchcraft, or the magical arts, or the dark arts, or things like that. There’s always been this element of secrecy, that it takes some training to learn to master, so you’re going to have all kinds of levels of occult. You’re going to get people doing it who don’t even know what they’re doing. You get people dabbling with it. You get people intentionally trying to grow their skills, and then you get people who are generationally wrapped up in it for centuries.

[03:39] Stephanie: Well, on that note, what are some common practices that people may or may not realize are related to the occult?

[03:46] Marcus: So I think occult, and I think of secrecy. I put it in two categories: knowledge and power. So you’ve heard the expression “knowledge is power”, and there’s some truth to that because if I know things that you don’t know, then I have a power in that situation that you don’t have. This is why it was routine practice in the occult and in paganism, to ask priests to look for omens and to look for signs to see if it was a good time to engage in a business deal, or a good time to go to battle, or which city they ought to invade.

There’s even a passage in scripture where God says that he intervenes in the divination process of the pagan kings to make sure that their omens send them to the city he wants them to go to. He’s like, “It doesn’t matter what they do. I’m going to make sure they come and get you, Jerusalem.” That’s basically what he says in this passage. That’s kind of the idea of knowledge and power.

There are common practices in pursuing knowledge, and then there are common practices in pursuing power. The ones that are related to pursuing knowledge are the horoscopes and all things related to divination and astrology, basically, and the third category would be like actually encountering spirits, either the spirits of the dead, demonic spirits, spirits of supernatural beings.

So people who do things like seances, that would be a form of trying to contact the dead. Ancestor worship is beginning to get very popularized thanks to modern movies. But it’s this idea that I can contact and talk to and have relational connection with people who are dead. And that is strictly forbidden in the scriptures. It’s called necromancy. You are not to gain knowledge and have relationships with those who are dead, or the spirits of those who are dead.

Those are those three main categories for where they get knowledge from: one is the stars and divination, one is from spirits and I guess it was stars, and [one] from divination and from spirits. Does that make sense?

[05:53] Stephanie: Well, and I just think about so many things. That you just walk into a Barnes and Noble and, “Oh, look. There’s a stand all about your horoscopes, and tarot cards, and Ouija boards.” And all of this stuff – just pop culture – everybody knows what it is. Some people don’t think it has any power, and they’re just playing with it because it’s kind of fun or curious or what their friends are doing. And other people think, “Hey, I can get some secret knowledge or some specialized knowledge or power.”

[06:25] Marcus: It’s true because I met with a leader at a company, and they were talking about how they’ve learned to ask younger applicants as a standard part of the interview process, “What’s your sign?”  They’re like, “They all know their sign and they’re all happy to talk to you about it.” This thing has become very normalized. I’d like to walk this through a little bit, if I can.

[06:51] Stephanie: Yes, please.

[06:52] Marcus: So Clinton Arnold, who’s head of New Testament, now I think dean at the Talbot Seminary in Los Angeles. He’s an excellent New Testament scholar. He’s written a lot of commentaries. I heard him do a presentation one time where he said that in the pagan world, the highest source of knowledge were the fates. The fates knew what was going to happen to you. And here we are as mere humans far below, and between us mere mortals and the fates were the gods and various other spirits. And so we would ask these divine ones if they could get us some information from the fates. “Can you tell us what our fate is? Is this day fated to be good or is it fated to be bad? Is this business deal fated to be good or fated to be bad? Am I fated for victory or defeat in this battle?” That kind of thing. That’s where the word divination comes from. You would ask these divine ones for information about your fate.

Again, the Bible strictly forbids this. You are not to gain that kind of power, because what we’re doing when we practice the occult is we are trying to gain control of our life without reference to God. I’m saying, rather than turning to God and trusting him to be my refuge and my fortress, my shield, my buckler, my shepherd – all these wonderful things – my Father, I am going to try to take control of the situation myself by getting enough knowledge and power that I feel like I’m in control and I can handle this. And that’s one of the reasons why this is so forbidden. Another reason is that it puts us in direct contact with demonic spirits. And so God does not want that for us.

[08:31] Stephanie: Yes, yes.

[08:33] Marcus: Small, little thing. Just an add-on.

[08:34] Stephanie: Just a small thing. Yeah. Well, like we said, to start, if sin is opening a door, occult is like throwing open the garage door, because you’re not just doing things that attract demons, you’re literally summoning them, oftentimes saying, “Hey, please come.”

[08:53] Marcus:  Yes, exactly. And the problem here is there are children’s games for all of these things. Ouija boards is divination, but just bordering on summoning of a spirit. Seances directly [summon] a spirit. There’s an old parlor game kids used to play called Bloody Mary, I’m sure it’s still played, where you’re summoning something, the idea of a summoning circle in witchcraft. All those things of summoning a being, and you’re hoping that that being will give you both knowledge and power.

And then when it comes to the psychics and fortune tellers, what are we looking for from a fortune teller or psychic? We want secret knowledge. People want to know whether my dead relative is okay, are you in heaven or are you in hell? So they’ll go to a psychic who supposedly knows the secret knowledge that gets you access to the secret realm.

I remember watching an Oprah show several years ago, and they had a psychic on there. Basically everybody in the audience, the psychic went through and told them things about their relatives that there is no way that psychic could have known. But all of the information that they told their guests was the kind of information that would be easy for a demon to know.

So I picture it this way: a psychic standing on the stage, a demon bird perched on his shoulder, and the guest stands up and says, “Oh, what’s happening with my grandma? I loved her so much.” And the bird over here is like, “Hey, anybody out there know? Any of my other demon friends? Oh yeah. Oh thank you.” And now suddenly whispers in the ear, “Yeah, well, they used to live in a house like this. They had this kind of stuff.” That’s easy, like you could google on the Internet.

It’s like stuff you could know that would be easy for anybody to know and that now the person is hooked and they think, “Okay, this person definitely has an inside track to the spirit world. I’m now going to believe anything that they tell me from this point on.” And that’s kind of the way that works. And so they would always tell them, don’t worry, your relative is in heaven no matter what the situation was. And you know, they’re happy.

[10:53] Stephanie: Which teaches a worldview that says you don’t need God., that Jesus is not the only way.

[10:58] Marcus: Exactly. And so it teaches heresy. And that heresy is supported by signs and wonders, but in this case they are counterfeit signs and wonders. And that’s why it says that the Antichrist comes with all sorts of counterfeit signs and wonders. And I don’t think he’s talking just about the ultimate Antichrist at the end of days. I think it’s talking about all things that are Antichrist. They come with counterfeit signs and wonders so that people, on the basis of the sign, of the wonder, buy whatever the truth is that comes next, regardless of whether that truth (I say truth kind of in quotes), so whatever the message is that the person has, will be taken as true from that point on because something supernatural has happened.

[11:36] Stephanie: This is making me think of that time at an ICBC conference when there was a psychic that was brought in, not to the ICBC conference, but it was meeting at a hotel. Anyway, do you know what story I’m telling? Do you want to?

[11:50] Marcus: I do. That is actually where I was going to go next. So great minds meet a lot. There you go. Or as my dad used to say, “Great minds get stuck in the same ruts”. But yes, this was before I was with ICBC and Deeper Walk. Before that, when Mark Bubeck was president, they had their conferences at the conference center in Sioux City, Iowa. They would have some of the rooms set aside for their conference, but other people might use some of the other rooms at this relatively large conference center.

So they got there for the ICBC Conference on Spiritual Warfare and how to help Christians with this aspect of ministry. Sure enough, the business that had rented the space next to them had hired a psychic for their entertainment for the evening. So, discovering this, all of the leaders of ICBC, the board, key staff members, whatever, prayer-walked the property, they prayer-walked the area, which they always did, but now they specifically forbade any spirits from me being able to communicate to that psychic tonight. They just said, “As people who are also in this thing, we forbid any demonic activity here and cut it off.” Well, sure enough, when the psychic got up to perform that night, he said, “I’ve never had this happen before, but I’m getting nothing.” And he packed up and left without doing a show. So I could tell bunches of stories like that. But, yeah, that’s a classic one.

[13:18] Stephanie: Yes. Well, and I think it’s a great illustration of our practical authority in Christ, and that it’s not just a matter of avoiding or staying away from things. It’s also that we can interact on a practical level.

On that note, I’ve heard people afraid of: is witnessing the occult enough to demonize someone, or do you have to participate in order to get demonized?

[13:48] Marcus: That’s a very good question. You know, reading about the occult won’t demonize you. Witnessing the occult doesn’t demonize you, but what happens is whether you’re reading about it, watching it in a movie, witnessing it in person, what that does is now you have to do something with that. What happens is it makes a lot of people open the door to fear or open the door to curiosity. And both of those doors can open a door to the dark side, to quote Yoda. It’s like this also is a path to the dark side. The idea is that there is a sense here that the event in itself isn’t what demonized us, but it was our response to that.

[14:30] Stephanie: Well, I was even just thinking, we’ll talk about this in a couple episodes, lies we believe. That there is a matter also of what is discipling you. And so if you are not rooted in truth and you are witnessing occult things and receiving it as true, like, “Oh, yeah, well, that would be the right thing to do”, or that “I would be right to be afraid of that because of this”, or “I would be right, or I don’t see a problem with that or whatever.”

That still wouldn’t necessarily give you a demon. But I think that’s another avenue wherein it’s shaping your worldview, and so you have to be discerning as you are interacting with it.

[15:07] Marcus: That’s very true. Today’s kids are definitely being discipled in an occult worldview. And even the Avengers, as much as I love the shows, and as fun as they are, the worldview there and even the multiverse itself, while there is a dimension of truth to the idea that there’s an unseen realm that can be explained in terms of a multiverse, what happens here is that whether it’s Indiana Jones saying the Ark of the Covenant is an occult object and it can be used for good or for evil, or whether it’s Disney saying black magic can only be overcome by white magic, whether it’s Star Wars, if you want to defeat a Sith, you need a Jedi. All of these things are kind of moving us into a subconscious kind of acceptance of, “Oh, yeah, that could be.”

It’s because it’s relentless and it’s everywhere that we turn. And those are the major franchises, but it’s everywhere. And so what happens is we begin to accept things that we didn’t used to accept as being okay. It’s that classic frog in the kettle thing where if you had taken me out of the sixties world I lived in and dropped me into today’s world, I would have jumped out. Right? It’s like, are you kidding me? But having lived through the last 60 years and the whole gradual transition, and you experience this and you experience that, and you experience this and experience that. They don’t jump out and startle you with the same kind of shock that they would have if this had all happened at once.

[16:40] Stephanie: Right. I guess I would just circle back to the idea of discernment. And I think every person is at a different stage with understanding where they’re at, with how they interact. We just need to inform ourselves and make sure that we are being discipled first and foremost by God and the Bible.

But I don’t think we have to be afraid. Like you said, we watch Avengers and enjoy Avengers, and there’s a lot of good in Avengers, but we also have the discernment to sift through stuff.

[17:12] Marcus: Well, yeah, whether it’s in Percy Jackson. You can learn a lot about Greek mythology from Percy Jackson, but it also has the effect, if you’re not careful, of making you like the Greek gods. You start thinking fondly of them, which is a common satanic theme, and it’s called sympathy for the devil. This idea, “Oh, you know, they’re not that bad. They’re misunderstood. There’s actually some good here if we just look for it.”

And so you get a lot of people from what we call white witchcraft, and they will defend it as, we’re just trying to help people. And they’ll even call themselves Christians, that they have this very syncretistic brand of Christianity that incorporates the occult into it and because they believe that what they are trying to do is good, they don’t see a disconnect between that and New Testament Christianity. So we can talk about that more in some future episode.

[18:05] Stephanie: I was going to say, oh, man, there’s so many branching episodes coming out of this one that we definitely should talk about more at some point. Do you want to just touch briefly on syncretism, since you mentioned it?

[18:16] Marcus: And I also probably need to get back to some basic practices related to power, because all we’ve talked about is knowledge up to now.

[18:22] Stephanie: Yes.

[18:23] Marcus: Okay, so syncretism. You can hear in there two words: syn is the Greek word sun, which means “together with”. So it’s not sin, like I’m sinning. It’s sun, meaning together with. And then you can hear cretism comes from credo, which is the Greek word for belief. And the idea is that syncretism is putting beliefs together that don’t belong together. That’s the basic idea of what syncretism is.

So it is a Christian practicing the occult, that’s syncretism. It’s like those two things do not go together. They should not be together. And if I create a worldview as a Christian that allows for some level of occult, I am a syncretistic Christian.

The first time I ran into this, my father, your grandfather, who was professor of missions, was talking about one of the missional challenges in Africa, where witch doctors were so powerful and this occult worldview was so powerful and so ingrained that a lot of Christians were converting but not getting rid of their occult practices. And so syncretistic Christianity was this huge problem in Africa.

That was the first time I heard about it. Well, now we see it everywhere. And everywhere you look for it, once you begin looking for people who are blending Postmodernism into Christianity are syncretistic. People who are blending the worship of the ancestors, the worship of saints into Christianity, are syncretistic. People who are transforming the honor of Mary into the worship of Mary are syncretistic. People who are putting objects around their house thinking those objects will ward off evil spirits, that’s syncretism. That’s Christians practicing occult solutions to their problems.

So we do need to be aware and be careful of these things. And my point here is, I may have sounded like I was attacking Catholics, and my point here isn’t to attack Catholics. My point is to attack the form of Catholicism that moves too far with these things. That’s my point. Just like my point is to attack forms of evangelicalism or the charismatic movement that move too far with these things and sometimes do things in the name of Christ, not even realizing that what they’re actually doing is just flat out occult. And that’s what syncretism is.

[20:41] Stephanie: Thank you for that explanation. You wanted to move into power.

[20:46] Marcus: Yes. So while knowledge is related to wanting to get information from spirits and from divination and from omens and things like that, what power is about is wanting to make things happen. I want to use spiritual power to make things happen.

There are two views on this: One is this idea that spiritual power is relatively neutral, that it’s like electricity. And in this sense, witch doctors, high priests of pagan and witchcraft, think that shamans, witch doctors, priests, these kinds of people, are like electricians who have studied and know how to manipulate power for good or for evil. In this sense, there are people who approach the occult like it’s this neutral thing that can be used for white magic or for black magic. It can be used for good or for bad.

But then there’s another approach to it that says no. They realize that there is actually a personality. There’s a being behind this power. And not just one being. There’s not one all powerful devil. There’s this whole kingdom of darkness where a whole lot of different beings have different kinds of powers and are able to do different kinds of things. What happens is, people begin to become infatuated. Well, which being do I need to connect to in order to get this done? And which being do I need to connect to in order to get the other thing done? And which being will protect my home, and which being will help me defeat my enemy. And that’s where you start to get paganism.

And there are various types of witchcraft. For example, there’s witchcraft that is more neutral in its way that it looks at magic, and there’s witchcraft that definitely knows that they are summoning spiritual beings to get what they want. And so when we look at this kind of power, that’s what we’re talking about. There are both kinds of occult that are pursuing power. I can do this through words like incantations and spells. I can do this by spells and curses, or I could do this with a magic wand. That’s one way of practicing occult power.

Another is to do some sort of a ritual or a sacrifice. And the idea here is that the greater the sacrifice, the greater the level of power you should be able to summon. That’s the thinking behind it. So that’s the power side of the occult. How do I gain control of this, of what I want to control? And in that process, I’m not trusting God. I’m trying to take control. So you can even see this in syncretism, where Christians will try to create the reality that they want with their words. And they don’t understand that they’re not trusting God at all. They’re trying to coerce God into creating the reality that they want created. And that’s not really what’s supposed to be happening.

[23:29] Stephanie: Faith isn’t just that he can do something and so you’re going to believe that he’ll manifest it into reality because there’s capability there.

[23:40] Marcus: There’s a very blurry line there between Christianity and the occult once you start saying as a Christian that I can declare something and turn it into reality by my words. That’s a very occult concept, and it’s something we need to be very careful of.

[23:55] Stephanie: Oh, man, there’s so much more to talk about. But we are coming up in the end, and we haven’t even gotten to R.E.D. yet, so we need to jump to RED. I think this is really important for us to cover. When it comes to the occult and reclaiming the surrendered ground in someone’s life, you have another helpful acrostic. It’s Renounce, End, Destroy. So let’s talk about this.

Let’s talk about if you have been in the occult or you’re working with someone who has, and you need to get out of it, or you’ve got an occult object that you didn’t realize was occult, or that you now know you don’t want around anymore. What do you do? How do you get the enemy out?

[24:32] Marcus: Yes, this is important, right? “Renounce” is this legal declaration that I make when I say, “I now renounce my participation in…” whatever it was, and I’m as specific as possible. “I now renounce my participation in those seances. I now renounce my participation in that coven. I now renounce my participation with Ouija boards.” That’s the R of the RED. I now renounce those things.

And you say, “Well, what’s the difference between that and creating reality with your words?” What I’m doing when I say this is I’m making a declaration of agreement with God that this was wrong and I shouldn’t have been doing it. I’m not creating reality with my words, I’m agreeing with God’s reality. So it’s a different thing.

The E is Ending memberships. So if I actually joined a coven, I need to end that membership somehow. If I joined an occult society, I want to end that membership.

And then the D is I’m going to Destroy any objects that keep me tied to those practices and to their membership. So the rule of thumb on what do I destroy? What I do destroy is if the object was created for an occult purpose, like a Ouija board. You destroy it. If it was something that somebody put a curse on, like somebody gave you a bracelet, but the bracelet came from a witch and they put some kind of incantation on it, you can cut off the incantation. Normally, you can cut off the curse, you can break that, you can make the demons leave, and you can keep the bracelet. But there are people who will destroy it just to be safe. I’m just saying that the rule of thumb here is if it was created for an occult purpose, you destroy it. If it was something that a curse was placed on, you can generally cleanse it. So that’s RED. Renounce, End membership, Destroy. Yes, destroy things that keep you tied to it.

[26:21] Stephanie: That is so helpful. Well, we need to wrap up this episode, and next week we’re going to continue working through the SOUL-L acrostic with a look at how unforgiveness gives ground to the enemy. But for now, any final thoughts on this very large topic?

[26:36] Marcus: Yes, well, this is one of those topics that a lot of Christians want to avoid. I had a theology professor say, “I never talk about this stuff because whenever I do, weird things happen around my house.” I’m like, but isn’t that the exact reason why we need to prepare people? Isn’t that a good reason? Why shouldn’t you know what to do to keep all that weird stuff from happening around your house? I think it’s just a completely wrong answer. Too many Christians are like, “I just stay away from it. I just avoid it.”

But as you’ve heard me say a hundred times, the devil is not a big bumblebee. The principle isn’t, leave him alone and he’ll leave you alone. The principle here is resist the devil and make him flee from you. So what we’re trying to do here is expose things that Christians need to know about so they can avoid them, so they can renounce them, and also for parents, so they can protect their kids from this stuff.

[27:31] Stephanie: Yes, indeed. Thank you, Father.

And thank you all for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk is a nonprofit organization and we partner with people like you in order to do what we do. Some are on the trail with us as official Trailblazers who commit to donating $25 or more per month. We invite you to consider becoming a Trailblazer. You can do this very simply by visiting our website, deeperwalk.com

If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the On the Trail Podcast, leave a review, and share with your friends.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.